And I had to wonder while I watched the mosh-pits if these kids were even listening.

He could say from experience

that Babe Ruth was an asshole,

but he never said it on the field.

Ten years removed from my youth baseball experience, I find myself in a car with four baseball-obsessed college buddies, headed toward the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome to see the Minnesota Twins play a mid-September game against the Detroit Tigers. I have no idea why I’m here.

How fucking weird is the knuckle ball?

That was the year Dave Kingman’s pop fly never came down at the Metrodome
Nineteen players were ejected... more

Before the nasty glances, which I sense to be for me, I shake my downcast head, grin in disappointment, and mutter “Damn.”

While waiting in my car outside your house I counted thirteen wrinkled ticket stubs I’d tucked inside the glovebox after games
to serve as some reminder of the season so far.

Single tear

PS - Takeshi Kitano is god

I wanted to focus on the real victims, unthinkable crimes against them, but I kept coming back to those batting cages, to that uniform in Coach B's house.

Baseball is, if nothing else, a reason, and so it is everything:

While he runs, you think about how long it’s been since you stepped on a baseball field. Your chest fills up with sharp fragments of Little League afternoons, standing in left field praying for something to do and dreading it at the same time

The victors every year were The Plague. They were barrel chested, they were drunk, they were titans, hitting pitch after pitch back to the fences were the Classics hid their weaker players. 

Don’t blame Ron Blomberg.

I used to bring a six pack, pound a beer between tokens, but I’m married now and I have to get home safely.

You look like you just walked out of a punt, pass and kick contest. We gotta make you look sick."

I’m thankful for the throwaways. Like the time the Bears lost in extra innings. Randy Bass, pre-Hanshin Tigers Randy Bass, had committed... more

Then something funny happened / after months of imprisonment, / handled like/ animals, less than/ animals, / they started playing baseball.

I wanted to quit, and was too young to realize that I could just quit anything.

But I see the look on his face, the lawn sprinklers waving back and forth like paper fans, the cicadas and their dim crescendoing dirge, and the panicgrass that the boy runs back through as he realizes what fetching me will cost him.

I wanted to see Akari and have a drink so we could get a little drunk and maybe take our clothes off.

The trees all richly clad, yet devoid of pride, fat with birds and the season, have called back days and years for the history they are giving me. 

The sun was lost in an orange circle of haze and falling in the western sky.

There are jars of herbs in 100-proof vodka on a shelf in the kitchen.

What I like most about the story is that the grossness makes way for the sadness.